After getting back from vacation in Vegas I decided I needed to sort my laptop out once and for all. So partitioned the drive in two, one with Vista Ultimate and one with Fedora 9.

On top of this I really wanted the Fedora partition to be encrypted and using LVM so I can resize later, glad I did that.

However in all I had two problems along the way,

Fedora 9 Wifi doesn't support TKIP

The first thing which I couldn't fix was the Wifi. I was using WPA+TKIP which is available in the network configuration panel, all good but everytime I tried to connect it'd popup the password entry screen again; really annoying.

Thankfully I found the reason to this, Fedora 9 does not support TKIP even though it's available in the control panel; switching to WPA+AES clears that problem.

Just wish they documented that better ;-)

32-bit Flash on a 64-bit build

Adobe released the Flash 9 libraries to the linux community but only as 32-bit binaries, I installed Fedora using the 64-bit build so with some tweaking managed to fix that too.

• Adding Flash to Fedora

In Terminal do:

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm'
su -c 'yum install flash-plugin'

Now specifically for 64-bit Fedora builds do:

su -c "yum -y install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386 libflashsupport.i386"
su -c 'mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v'

Afterwards close & reopen Firefox and you should now have Flash 9 running on your Fedora 9 64-bit desktop.

One thing that might muck up your beautifully designed AJAX popups is the user repeatedly hitting the tab key, simple way of stopping this is by inserting a onkeydown event for the keypress..

Trapping TAB

Simple and effective, as soon as the user's cursor gains focus for the username textbox if they then try to hit TAB within it it won't do anything; effectively trapping the action dead.

Obviously if you've got two boxes (username + password), you'll want to put this kind of trap on the password textfield otherwise the user won't be able to tab to the next cell, but as a quick fix it works well.

Setting Focus

You can also set focus via...

$('username').focus();

Flash 9

sudo rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
sudo yum install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-lib.i386
sudo yum install flash-plugin
mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v

After that you should have the 64-bit edition of Flash 9 running in Firefox, the 32-bit edition is much easier.

Quicktime

sudo yum install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in mencoder
sudo /usr/bin/mozilla-plugin-config -i -f

Re-open Firefox and you should get some new video plugins enabled.

• Fedora 8 media links

Steve Jobs has confirming that the iPhone official launch date will be November 9 with a launch price of £269 inc VAT.

Being a developer I cannot tell you how much this potentially means to the wired world, this little box of tricks could finally give the Mobile-Web world the push it needs. For such a long time the mobile internet platform has been stalling compared to it’s desktop counterpart.

So much looking forward to getting one of these and seeing what makes it tick.

So much potential!

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